The books / Planting for Bees / chapter 4 of 21
The gap is worth more than the peak
All chapters
- A quarter hectare in a circle of 1,260
- Reading a bloom window
- Where the year sags
- The gap is worth more than the peak
- Nectar plants and pollen plants
- Willow, the first pollen
- Phacelia, six weeks from seed
- Borage
- Sowing for a date
- A strip sown too late
- White clover in the grass
- A meadow takes two years
- Lavender is for the bees, not the jar
- Heather, the gap's own honey
- Fruit trees and the years before blossom
- A lime tree for the next keeper
- Black locust
- Ivy on the fence
- Nothing to water, nothing dies
- What a planting can name on the jar
- Siting the hive matters more
Put the same kilo of nectar into May and into August and it does two different things. In May the main flow is on, the fields are full, and the kilo is one among a great many. In August it is the difference between a colony gaining weight and one eating the stores it will need in winter.
The dearth is also when robbing peaks. Foragers with nothing to bring home test the entrances of weaker hives, and a large brooding colony can outrun its stores within a week or two. Nectar coming in gives them work of their own.
That is why this book says sow for the gap first.